Introduction

You need to make a decision but don’t want to make a mistake. For decades, Dr. Constance Dierickx has helped leaders make wise decisions. Now, she’s sharing how to see what others don’t and make great decisions when it matters most. So come on in and have a seat. It’s time for your appointment with The Decision Doctor.

Constance Dierickx

Welcome to this episode of The Decision Doctor.

My guest is Dr. Nikki Blacksmith, a psychologist who advises venture capital and private equity partners on pivotal decisions regarding their prospective investments and portfolio companies, most especially who should be in leadership positions.

Prior to starting her firm, BlackHawke Behavior Science, Nikki worked at the Army Research Institute, helping the army learn to reduce decision mistakes due to cognitive biases.

Nikki and her team have created and done the validation studies on methods to reduce error. and inequities in investment decisions.

Our conversation ranges from the common but ineffective practices and hiring to the trap of decisions we don’t even know we are making. Join us as we talk about leadership, decisions, and how sometimes even smart people stand on a scale to find out how tall they are.

Hi, Nikki, all the way in Chicago. It’s great to see you. 

Nikki Blacksmith

Oh, thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Constance Dierickx

Good. I’m so glad to talk to you. It’s always fun to talk to you because I always learn something. Every conversation we have, I learn something, and I’m curious for you to share your story about how you came to be doing what you’re doing, and I’m going to let you put your own words on what that is first. If someone asks you on an airplane, what do you do? What do you say? And then how did you come to do that thing in the way that you do it now? 

Nikki Blacksmith

Sure. The airplane question, that’s hard. It’s always what mood am I in? How much do I want to talk? I’ve been an industrial organizational psychologist. And I came to be doing that because I was really drawn to psychology, just understanding what makes people tick, why do they behave the way they do? Why are we different from each other? And how are we different from each other? But in my early days, I didn’t really understand, what do you do with the psychology information? It’s really cool that this experiment showed that people gamble in one way or whatever they were doing, and there really wasn’t a path other than academics back when I was in undergrad. A business school professor who’s at the University of Iowa, Ken Brown, came and did a talk, and he started talking about Iowa’s psychology and how psychology was applied to the workplace and that was just so cool to me. So I was like, oh, now I see the real life application to psychology. I just kind of took a leap of faith and applied to the programs they told me were good. One day I was moving to North Carolina without ever having been to the South. That was quite the culture shock. But that’s how I started my career in IO psychology. What I’m doing now is working with venture capitalists and private equity to help them really understand the people that they’re investing in. Most, if not all funders, will tell you that their final decision on who to invest in always comes down to the people. But people are complex and seemingly unpredictable, but that’s not the case. They actually are very predictable if you know how to analyze who they are and understand behavior. And so that’s really what I help them do is figure out, are these people that they’re evaluating going to perform in the future in a way that they’re going to get a return on their investment? It brings together all the things that I’ve done in my career from building hiring assessments to studying cognitive bias and decision-making.

And it just really, really felt together that, okay, I’m studying really important decisions and understanding how people behave as part of that decision and predicting behavior in the future, which are, to me, all really fascinating questions and a lifetime’s worth of – I always joke that I have a to-do list for 10 years, like I’ll never be done. So I’m happy to answer more questions, but that’s kind of the basis of how I got here.

Constance Dierickx

And well, it’s no wonder we gravitated toward each other when we met. My path is similar. I was actually working as a stockbroker. I wasn’t a psychologist till I was older. We won’t say how old, but I was fascinated and, well, I don’t know if I was fascinated. I was haunted by trying to understand why smart people with money could make such incredibly stupid decisions. For example, I think the one that haunted me the most was a woman who came in and said she wanted to close her account. She had something like $250,000 worth of assets, and she wanted to close her account, and I was the newbie. She didn’t have a regular connection with a broker, so I was the new kid on the block, so I got her and I said, what are you planning to do with the money? And she said, oh, well, I need to get out of the stock market. It’s too risky. My son-in-law is opening a new retail store, and I’m going to invest in his store. And then there was a college professor who thought he had figured out a formula for making money trading options, and he hadn’t, and he lost probably 80% of the value of his account. He wasn’t my client, thank goodness. But when I saw people doing things like that and suffering really damaging results – now the lady who gave the money to her son-in-law, I don’t know what happened to her because we never saw her again, but I was really haunted. So that led me into psychology, but as you know, I’m a clinician, so you and I went to grad school and took completely different paths, and then fast forward, I don’t know, a couple decades, we met at the Association for Psychological Science Conference in Washington, D.C. You were moderating a panel.

You were moderating the panel, and you were a presenter at the same time. So you were juggling, which you did without incident. You and I weren’t the only panelists, but I was a panelist, and I think I spoke last, maybe. One of the other panelists who shall remain nameless was sort of boring, and I thought, my Lord, why did I say I would do this? And then you got up and I went, oh, wait a second, she works with venture capitalists and private equity and she does deals and I do M&A and this is really exciting.

Nikki Blacksmith

Yeah, I think I had the same reaction to hearing you speak.

Constance Dierickx

Well, that was what was so funny was I think the contrast effect – for the listener, the contrast effect is exactly what it sounds like. You’re comparing something to something. It’s an important way people make decisions. But you and I were so lively. The audience was actually listening to us and so we quickly gravitated toward one another. Subsequently, I’ve learned more about what you do and I’m really interested for you to talk about VCs and PEs, how they make decisions and I completely agree with you. They do their analysis, they look at the results of a business, and they do all the stuff that’s probably easier to do. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s more straightforward. It’s more obvious. At the end of the day, if they don’t develop a strong sense of trust in the capability of a leader, they won’t invest. And that’s very wise, but you actually categorize what some of those dimensions are that investors need to pay attention to, and you’ve run the validation studies. So tell us a little bit about that aspect. I’ll just interject that I find that when people are assessing others, again, it’s a case of smart people doing things that are erroneous. Use all sorts of measurement tools or interview techniques that really end up with a haystack of data and very little information.

Nikki Blacksmith

So true. When I was actually doing my postdoc at the Army Research Institute, studying cognitive bias – the Army was very interested in improving the decision making skills of soldiers – when I really came across the decision making realm of VC, and I was just shocked at some of the success rates. Like, how few started to succeed, there were such obvious inequities in the funding and distribution, like, most men and white men get all of the funding pretty much. And as a person who was studying decision making, I was just like, what? How are they making these decisions? And I studied, and tried to learn as much as I could. It’s a very closed off industry. So it’s hard to find information. But from doing interviews and reading books written by venture capitalists, I found that they were using reference calls and unstructured interviews.

And as an IO psychologist, those are the least predictive methods. So like you said, they were gathering all this information, but it wasn’t very useful information. So they’re losing time, they’re spending money, and really not getting the results that they could have seen. They’re not only using results, but also relying a lot on gut instinct. And as a psychologist, we know that there’s a lot of bias when it comes to decision making without data. Your brain has been trained to make shortcuts and assumptions based on past experience. And sometimes, that can be very useful, especially for someone who’s been in the industry for a long time. What I was seeing was that there’s these myths about what makes a good entrepreneur. For example, a lot of investors put a lot of faith in confidence. Of course, I wouldn’t want to invest in somebody who I didn’t feel confident in or they weren’t confident that they could do what they do, but the issue is that they’re mistaking confidence for performance. And if you’re familiar with the The Dunning-Kruger effect, people who have the lower capabilities, let’s say in sales, for example, tend to overestimate their abilities in how well they sell, whereas people who are really good tend to underestimate. So the confidence factor, while it’s important, can be a little bit misleading, often, if you don’t truly understand. So you’re asking about those dimensions. And those are what’s really important. You can coach confidence, you can teach confidence. Confidence comes with experience, so a lot of first time founders might not exhibit as much as they will in the future. The dimensions I think that are most important, I think it varies by the phase the startup is in or the entrepreneur, but let’s say the early idea phase. You’re going to really need a founder who’s good at futuristic thinking, anticipating what’s going to come down the line, someone who can think abstractly. It’s very hard to create a vision of what could be if you’re not good at that abstract thinking, you expect to do the concrete logical step-by-step.

You really have to have somebody who can imagine who creates a lot of ideas. But the trick is, those are all really great skills, and I, myself, would consider myself one of those visionary founders, but that can come at a price if you don’t have somebody who offsets or has a different skill set than you. One of my early co-founders, she was a very concrete thinker, so she wasn’t necessarily the visionary, but she was the one that helped me figure out, okay, how am I going to take that vision and turn it into reality and actually execute and make those decisions.

And I would come up with idea after idea. It would overwhelm her, so after a while, she was like, enough with your ideas, let’s focus, let’s figure out what are the priorities, where are we going to start? We need baby steps. We need step number one. And I didn’t have that skill set. Thank God she did, but the key is really to think about the collective or the team. So what are the dimensions that you need, and not every single person is going to have all of them. It’s really about whether you have that combination of people that have all those things you need. So you were talking about the validation studies we did. We studied, basically, everything we could find on and what makes a successful startup from a behavioral standpoint. Not what are the financials or the go-to marketing strategy, but what are those behaviors that a leader, an entrepreneurial leader enacts, and we found 12 of them. For example, vision, which I just talked about. They have to have that ability to create the vision, communicate it, articulate it. Strategy. How are you actually going to accomplish that vision? Resourcefulness is another one, which is so important for entrepreneurs. They have so many limited resources, constraints, compared to maybe a large corporate organization. Knowing how to do a lot with very little is a critical component. I won’t go into all 12 of them, but those are three good examples of identifying what are the important things that entrepreneurs need to do and need to behave because it’s really hard to say, oh, we need an entrepreneur who can make $500,000 a year. $500,000 is the output of some sort of behavior and things that come beforehand. So we identify what behaviors it takes to get to that point. And those are so much easier to identify, to predict, and to coach, manage, train, all the wonderful human capital interventions that you and I think about all the time.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, and when I listen to you every time we talk and our conversations center around what are the behaviors? What do people actually need to do? Yet, when I’m interacting with clients or just people in the world, what they gravitate toward and what a lot of companies make a lot of money selling are instruments that allegedly measure personality. They’ll say things to me like, well, we use the fill in the blank. Especially if it’s the person who chose the instrument and convinces someone to put it in the budget and things like that, right? You want to rationalize your decision. They’ll say, well, it’s a valid instrument. And I think to myself, do I ask them whether it’s construct validity, content validity, convert validity, predictability? Do I go down the smart aleck route? And what I find so often, and maybe you see this, or maybe you have a different point of view, which would be interesting to me, is that the assumption is that, first of all, we know what personality is, that there are just lots of good measurement tools for it, and that, more importantly, it’s going to predict what a person will do in the future. I just find it so interesting that some organizations continue to use these tools when the outcome measure that I can show them is the turnover rate that they have or the number of times they hire a senior executive, pay them a lot of money, give them blotty, blotty bonuses and whatever, and then somewhere between 12 and 24 months, the rate of failure is so extraordinarily high and I see different statistics on this. But I’ve seen it myself in organizations where they keep using their same approach to hiring people that they’re paying a million dollars or two million dollars a year. And they keep failing half the time. It’s not funny, I shouldn’t have laughed, but it’s very expensive, and it’s very embarrassing. If you’re a public company and your board says, well, what happened to that CMO we paid all that sign-on bonus to? Well, you know. So what are your thoughts about how can you help organizations? How can we steer them away from using measures? It’s like they’re standing on a scale to find out how tall they are.

Nikki Blacksmith

Yeah, no, that’s a great – and you said validity, which is I think a mistake because that’s my favorite topic.

Constance Dierickx

I was hoping that it would be, like, here’s a fat, juicy [smooch noise].

Nikki Blacksmith

It is. It’s so interesting. It drives me nuts when people say a tool is valid because there’s no such thing as a valid tool. It’s really about what is a tool valid for. And so a lot of times they’re using these tools that are maybe created for one purpose, but they’re using it for another. And that’s why they’re not necessarily that important. Personality is such a vast – well, yes, we don’t even know what it is to begin with, so let’s just say, the way people operate, that’s a very big world. There’s so many different ways to describe and understand somebody. And it matters which constructs or concepts you are measuring because they have to be job relevant. So if they’re measuring, let’s say, just to keep it simple for the listeners, like extraversion, which everyone’s very familiar with, but that has nothing to do with, necessarily, the job that they’re performing, perhaps they’re a coder and they’re sitting behind their screens all day and not talking to a single person, then extraversion is probably not that predictive of a trait for that particular job.

So it really matters about what it is you’re measuring and understanding how it fits or predicts that particular job. So you can have a tool that’s perfectly valid in one setting and completely invalid in another setting. And so I think that’s part of the reason. Also, like you said, the other reason I don’t like the word valid is because validity is an ongoing process. It should never stop. The world changes, jobs change. So just using one tool over five, 10, 15 years without reevaluating every few can lead to those situations that you describe where they’re just not very useful. All of sudden they’re using a tool and the job’s completely changed. They’re hiring for something that existed in the past that no longer exists today. So yeah, validity, I think, is complicated and it’s really hard to explain because I spent 20 years just trying to understand it myself. There’s a lot of precision that goes behind a lot of these tasks, and the ones that come off the shelf aren’t always built for every single particular position or job that exists.

Constance Dierickx

Right. Or they’re never meant, and so they’re trying to measure some underlying constructs that we make the assumptive leap that, oh, this has to do with this job or this has to do with a culture fit. So therefore, everyone needs to look like this or the other. But what this leads me to want to talk about is our clients are very senior people. They own a company, they’re making investment decisions. People I spend the most time with are CEOs, public companies, private companies, a large not for profit that I just started working with and I’m just in love with and can’t name them, but I love them because of what they do. So if you’re a CEO, if you’re a VC partner, private equity partner, and somebody in your company brings you a budget request, and they say, well, we need to buy this instrument because it’ll measure this thing, and we know that blah, blah, blah, how does a top leader who is not going to go take courses in psychometrics, measurement and all that kind of stuff, how do we help them ask the right questions when we have the details, you, more than I, on this topic, but we know better, but they’re not going to do this deep dive. How do we help them? I have to admit I’ve resorted sometimes to snarky comments, which I can only do with a CEO that I’ve known long enough that we have enough trust that a sense of humor is now part of our relationship. But what do you say?

Nikki Blacksmith

Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s something I wrestle with a lot, because I get a lot of questions often like, well, what can a startup CEO do with little resources and without a degree in psychology. I thought about this a lot and what would they say if you ask that same question about an attorney, right? They’re not going to go to law school overnight and learn everything. They hire somebody or they bring on somebody that has that expertise and can exist. I think because we’re working with people, it feels like something maybe everybody should be able to do, but it is a specialty, it is a training. That’s why you and I went and got our doctorate degrees and spent our lives you know inside a book because it is an expertise that requires a lot of training. So when I talk about leaders and building a team, I always tell them you can’t know everything and do everything and be everything to everyone. So the smartest thing a leader can do is surround themselves with the people that have those expertise or skill sets that they don’t. And I think bringing on somebody, whether it’s in-house or an advisor or hiring someone to coach them or whatever it is, that’s the smartest thing to do, bringing somebody with the expertise. I mean, it’s difficult to tell you because I want to give them tools and resources.

Constance Dierickx

Right. Yeah, I’m reminded of a conversation. I wasn’t thinking this when I threw this topic on the table, but now I’m reminded of a conversation you and I had maybe a month ago, and I was calling you about a client of mine because I wanted to introduce you to them. So I was giving you some background. By the way, for the listener, my client gave me permission to speak to Nikki about them and to reveal things that would not ordinarily be shared with anyone. And I work very closely with a CEO and I also coordinate a lot with his CHRO, and she was asking me about leadership development for the team, not something I do, except extremely rarely. And, and I said, well, you need a profile, a description of what good looks like at the executive level in this organization. Something not generic. And so, then you and I spoke, and you took it down to a much more granular level and started talking to me about behaviors. So I think part of the answer to what do you say to a CEO is what’s your strategy? Where are you going?

And when you think about the enabling capabilities for your strategy, I’m thinking of Roger Martin’s process, it’s where do you play? How do you win? What are the capabilities you need? When you think about the capabilities that you need, it’s not just about supply chain and IT and AI or whatever, but get it down to the behaviors. So I think that’s a lot of words, but there’s probably a shorter question or a piece of advice we could give a CEO, which is you need to know what you need behaviorally from the people and team, and recognizing, as you said, there are very few people that are good at lots of things.

Nikki Blacksmith

Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I think surrounding yourself with people that have that expertise. Hiring is difficult because you’re hiring for positions, often, that you have absolutely no expertise in.

So how is it that you go about judging whether or not somebody is going to be good in that position? First, don’t know what the position is, then you don’t know how to judge how someone’s going to be good. And actually, I’m in that position myself right now where we are trying to bring on someone in a technology role. We are between a fractional CTO to full stack developer. And I had to kind of do my own homework just to learn what those words even mean, first of all, but I got to a point where I’m like, I’m not going to learn everything to do this hire right. And so I got experts on the phone to counsel me on what I should be looking for, what does good mean, and what are the questions I should be asking, people that are in those specific positions that know. And I think that’s part of the key is recognizing the limitations or recognizing what you don’t know. A lot of times people just, oh, we’ll judge a couple characteristics and then put this person in this role without even truly understanding what it takes to be successful in that role, exactly like what you said. So having, what my colleague Neil Morelli, he wrote a chapter in my most recent book about creating job descriptions, which is oddly something that a lot of startup founders really struggle with. I shouldn’t say oddly because it makes sense because you don’t know every single job. But it sounds simple. He recommends creating what you call a job council. So creating a team of two, three people for every particular job that are actually knowledgeable about that domain or discipline and having them review content and job descriptions and giving information about what you should be looking for. That’s, I think, a simple way without having the 20 years of job analysis expertise that you can surround yourself with a team of people, a job council as Neil would call it, to help with a particular role. But that’s exactly what I’ve been doing with this technology role because even though my co-founder knows a lot, I feel like I need to be knowledgeable about the decision we make as well. So I have to really understand and take that deeper dive, and it does take a little bit of time. But I’d rather spend the time up front than get the wrong hire, lose a ton of money, so much time onboarding them, and then looking for somebody else. You talked about turnover earlier. I mean, that is one of the most costly things for an organization.

Constance Dierickx

Turnover, and especially when turnover is needed, when it should be precipitated by, let’s say the CEO, but the person in the position, the damage that they’re doing is not yet visible. So I have a story. This is sort of a merging of the two things that I love the most, decisions and crisis.

I had a client years ago who shall remain unnamed, as always. Most of my clients are confidential, as are yours, I’m sure. The CEO of the company wanted me to spend some time with their operation in Latin America. I won’t say where. Some big city in Latin America. And I always loved going to Latin America. First of all, it was an excuse to wear very high heels, otherwise I didn’t fit in. So I had a lot of fun going there, and I was really interested to get to know the general manager of this country, who was an American, not Spanish-speaking.

It was in a Spanish-speaking country. It was not in Brazil. And so I went down there and I would sit in on their staff meetings, it was the senior management team. So it was the CFO, the controller, all that. And I went down and after about two or three months, I went to the CEO back in the States, and I said, there’s something suspicious happening in finance. And he said, oh, that can’t be. The GM is a finance guy and we just had an audit and he went down the list. Then, he said something that is probably only a sentence uttered to women. He said, you’re being hysterical.

Constance Dierickx

I thought, well, that’s kind of cute. Okay. And I said, well, maybe I’m wrong. I’m not looking at the books. I’m observing behavior. And there are suspicious behaviors, and here’s what they are. And I told him. So I kept going back. Fast forward, maybe 90 more days. The general manager got fired. They wrote off a $14 million loss because the CFO, the controller, and the head of supply chain were in cahoots. So the CEO, he called me, he was very sheepish, and he said, I owe you an apology, this is what’s happened, I should have listened. And I said, well, the only evidence I had was the evidence that I’m qualified to gather. I hope you’ll realize that behaviors can tell you a lot about where to spend your energy digging further. I can’t tell you you’re losing money here and it’s this much and this is how it’s happening. And so that happened about 20 years ago. You can tell I’m talking about it today. I know that the CEO of the organization was a very smart man, but he was so committed to his decision to send that GM where he sent him, and he worked so hard to support him, and they spent a lot of money moving his family and stuff like that. It makes me think about how we rationalize decisions. So I’m curious to know from you, what’s an example of a smart executive that made a big mistake because they weren’t paying attention to behavior, they were relying on other things. I mean, something you can tell us anonymized, of course, because we don’t want to embarrass people in the podcast.

Nikki Blacksmith

Well, something that’s already out there in the public that you were talking about. You said the word Ponce earlier, the Theranos examples always taught me about that.

You read about those investors, they’re experts in their industry, and I read the book. And in the first chapter, I’m holding my head, like, what in the world? What is happening right now? Because there were so many cues, and they were all behavioral cues, like the lack of transparency. But they continued and continued and this went on forever. And I’m just thinking, this should have stopped at day one. How did they get so far? So many investors are involved in this business. And I think what you’re talking about is a lot of confirmation bias. When people have a belief or a decision, they just find information that confirms it. And then they are even more confident in this kind of this spiral of growing confidence, but only because they’re not paying attention to information that goes against, which is kind of the example that you explained where you’re so committed to the decision because, probably, they’d gathered a lot of information that confirmed it and were dismissing information that didn’t confirm it. And I see this a lot in investors, with founders, that they are convinced, it’s scary, but it’s like a macro level of groupthink where one investor, and I actually had some investors tell me that they consider themselves follow on investors, so they don’t actually conduct any due diligence, because they assume that the investment firm that invested in the startup first did their due diligence.

And so there’s this trust in, well, somebody did the work, we don’t have to do it. And that’s a mistake I see a lot where it’s like, this woman co-founder is telling me she was having a hard time getting fundraising and she kept going to investors, kept hearing, no, no, no, no, no. And then finally, one investor said, yes, and gave her money. And then all of a sudden, she starts getting calls back from other investors that said, no. They’re like, just kidding, we heard this investor is giving you funding. We’d like to jump on that bandwagon. And so they’re afraid they’re going to miss out on a deal or something. So there’s this, you know, if one investor says it, then it must be true. So then they just go on, and it manifests in a variety of different ways.

But this idea of trusting that somebody else has done the work and it’s kind of like peer pressure in the adult world, I guess, I’m not really sure. But that’s one of the things that I see often. We’re not good as human beings at making decisions. Otherwise, you and I would be out of a job. It does take a lot of work, and so that’s one of the things I think, the trust in other people’s due diligence and the work that they’ve done, and that if somebody else is investing, then it must be a smart deal.

Constance Dierickx

It reminds me of the wonderful work that Bob Cialdini did at Arizona State University for decades. He’s done research on influence and he wrote the book. It’s actually the title of the book. I think his most popular is Influence. We’re not going to release the video but you could probably see it on the shelf behind me. What we’re talking about here is what Bob has labeled “social proof.” So when I’m working with another consultant, I have a few individual clients, a lot of them are psychologists, and they’re trying to grow their consulting business, and I tell them that they need to use social proof. Usually, most of them aren’t social psychologists, and they’re like, what is that? And I say, well, it’s one thing to say why you’re good. It’s better if someone else says why you’re good. So if we go back to Theranos, and we think about who were some of the people involved? George Schulz, former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, people like that. If George Schulz, who was known to be a really stand up guy, says I’m investing in Theranos, and Henry Kissinger invests in Theranos, and some other people whose names aren’t as well known and wouldn’t appreciate me naming them, that’s what happens. So then you think about Bernie Madoff, and that a lot of his clients came – as long as you’re not using social proof for nefarious purposes, it’s fine. In fact, you and I have clients because of someone we’ve worked with in the past that got a lot of value out of working with us. Now, in my case, a CEO introduces me to another CEO. It’s easier to get traction in the conversation when I’ve had that. The responsibility, of course, is to be honorable, right? And not misuse that. So I think the idea of social proof is such a good one. Bob has other dimensions to influence that he talks about, and he talks openly about how, in the hands of an unethical person, these can be used. I have to believe that people that are charlatans really haven’t read Bob’s work. I think they’ve just accidentally happened to use these principles.

Nikki Blacksmith

Well, social work is interesting because what you’re talking about is social proof of the past, which is a completely different thing than somebody saying, “I think this is going to work in the future and therefore you should believe me because I have this foresight that nobody else has.”

You’re actually saying, “I’ve had this experience. Here’s what this experience was.” To me, that’s very trustworthy because you’re getting first hand, and I think that’s the basis of referrals. We get a lot of clients – most all of our clients come from referrals.

Constance Dierickx

Mine too. Without us going down a technical path here, I’m going to pull us back up and ask you about your decisions. What’s the best decision you’ve ever made about your business or your decision to get a PhD? Whatever domain you want to choose.

Nikki Blacksmith

I think probably going back to get my PhD was one of the best decisions. It was a hard decision, probably not financially smart because I was making adult money at the time, and then all of a sudden I decided to go back and be a student and that’s a different lifestyle. But it was advice one of my friends had given me when I was at Gallup. I used to work at Gallup, and he said, “The second that you get comfortable in a job is the second that you need to make a change.” I thought about that, and I’m like, that is so true because comfort means that I’m not learning. I’m not growing. I’m not challenging myself. I’m not putting myself in a position where I’m doing something new because, if I was, I’d be uncomfortable. For me, that decision to leave a very good job, a great organization to go and embark on a PhD, which is quite scary as you know, comprehensive exams and dissertations. When you’re not in the middle of it, it’s very intimidating to even think about starting it. So, to me, I was so much happier afterwards. I was so uncomfortable for years but I look back on that like I was learning so much every day. I think the decision to be an entrepreneur and not go down an academic path, which I almost did, was probably the second best decision because I feel like it’s almost the same thing where I’m uncomfortable every single day because I’m always learning something new. That is the beauty of growth and that’s what we coach a lot of our clients on is this idea that you have to get comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity and not knowing what’s going to happen because that’s the only way you’re going to grow. That’s the only way you’re going to take risks. That’s the essence of entrepreneurship is embarking on something nobody else has done before. So, of course, you’re going to be uncomfortable, but learning to get comfortable being uncomfortable is, I think, probably the best decision that I ever made because it’s allowed me to continue to take those risks and make decisions that enhance my life in ways that never would have been possible if I would have just stayed comfortable in a job that I was doing very well at, to jump into a position where I could easily fail.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, I think one reason why you resonate with sort of the character of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists is because you have, yourself, sort of jumped off a cliff, metaphorically, and said, “I’m going to upend my life.” I’ll close out with reminding us of a quote from Timothy Leary, and I won’t get it exactly right, but he says something like, “You’re only as old as the last time you changed your mind.” I’m sure I’ve inaccurately repeated his words but it’s one of my absolute favorite quotes. I think that sometimes when I see people not deciding, I’m very fascinated by the decisions that people make by default or they don’t realize they’re making a decision. When we keep putting one foot in front of the other on the same path, or we keep making hiring decisions the way we’ve always done it, we’re essentially avoiding a decision point that we may conclude that the way we’re doing it is fine, but we might not. So, I hope the listener to this podcast picks up on the number of times that that theme has come up in the podcast. I know you see your clients not realizing that there’s a decision, that there’s an option in front of them. Hopefully, none of our listeners will do that, but I want to thank you so much.

I learn every time I talk to you, and you did something a minute ago that I love, and I would like the listener to pay attention to it and use it in their own life. I talked about something, social proof, and then you did a “yes and,” right? And you shown the light on that issue in a different way. And so I thank you for that. Thank you for showing up. It’s been really fun to talk to you, of course.

Nikki Blacksmith

Yes, I had such a great time. And I’m sure if we had another hour, we could go down the path of decision inertia, not making the decisions or being afraid to make decisions. Another topic I’ve studied and find fascinating as well, but we’ll save that for another time. 

Constance Dierickx

Well, we’ll need to write an article about that. All right. See you, thanks so much.

Nikki, like all of my smart guests, offers important lessons in our conversation. She describes three of the essential traits for successful startup leaders.

And one cautionary note. What are those traits? The first is imagination. The ability to see opportunities. Second, resourcefulness, the ability to do a lot with a little. The third is prioritization. How do you avoid majoring in the minors? 

And what’s the cautionary note? Confidence does not equal competence. When you’re choosing someone for any role, you hope you see confidence. But you don’t want to get swayed into thinking that someone is competent without good evidence. We prefer behavioral data because, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Check out Nikki and her team at blackhawke.io.

Outro 

The Decision Doctor will be back with more advice soon. Hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app and check out TheDecisionDoctor.com to receive the Meta-Leadership self-assessment and other no-cost resources. We’ll see you next time.